I finally got around to checking them out and the newer versions of VMWare finally make use of your actual graphics card. As such, you can play Live 2000 and 2001 at a whole host of resolutions (Live 2000 allows up to some simply insane ones that could fill 40 inch monitors) maxed out more or less perfectly. (Both games seem to be made for 4:3, so other resolutions just stretch the image.)

What you need is merely VMWare Player (free) and some form of Windows XP (only 2000+ are supported for the graphic cards, so you can't use Win 98 SE Pdub) you can load into it. Oh, and the game of course. Then just install XP into a VM, give it a nice bunch of RAM to use (256 is fine, 512 is better, if you can give it a gig you'll like it even more), install the game and off you go. As noted you probably want to run it in a window at like 1024x768 or something rather than going full 1080p because of the stretching plus well, the visuals were not really made to be seen as such sizes... Also worth noting that 2001 is cursed by the evil console 640x480 menus. 2000 uses one resolution for everything, like a modern game now and back then, not like the shit EA sent us for half a decade.

If you can play 2K11 on your computer fine, you can max these out completely and run at a nice high resolution with no issues despite the virtualization overhead. Making an iso of the game disc helps too.

Live 99 and 98 still don't work right though. Through testing you can install the former and do anything in menus it just hates trying to do the actual gameplay most of the time, the latter installs but I have yet to figure out how to make it run. Anything 2003+ to my knowledge still works as intended on Vista+ so I didn't bother to test them. But it is a way to play the games in a window!

There is a free Windows XP disc image that Microsoft gave out for IE testing you can get if you don't have an XP disc or image but you have to set the dates back in the VM, I totally didn't find out how to do this because I just used an image of a disc I had but there are tutorials out there.

Found there might be an even better solution and that is using Windows 2000.

You can't install Live 99 on it because it does an OS check before install, but Live 98 actually runs. Well, the menus do, you can't play it. I do wonder if a Glide wrapper could take care of that though.

Windows 2000 has a lower overhead as well, so 2000 runs better even if you give the VM half the RAM. Although I got dunked on by Bryant Reeves.

Any Windows versions before 2000 do not have 3D acceleration support in VMWare Player. I am unsure if Oracle's VM thing does. Being able to load Windows 98 with full acceleration support would basically end the entire problem since it can run 16-bit games.

I'm going to try some DOSBox testing for the earlier games as well, it could be possible to play every EA basketball game except 98 and 99 on modern computers.

benji wrote: just install XP into a VM, give it a nice bunch of RAM to use (256 is fine, 512 is better, if you can give it a gig you'll like it even more), install the game and off you go. As noted you probably want to run it in a window at like 1024x768 or something rather than going full 1080p because of the stretching plus well, the visuals were not really made to be seen as such sizes...

So, if I'm reading benji correctly, I should be able to install and run NBA Live 2000 on a pc equipped with XP operating system, 256(+) bits of memory, & the free VMPlayer download? Is the VM Player necessary for play on XP -- or is the application used merely to render the graphics compatible with the updated platform? I'm wondering about Live 2000 specifically here.

Good to hear. Thanks, gentlemen. I'm having some trouble running Live on XP, myself. Wondering about this VM Player as a solution -- or whether, this desktop merely needs a memory jolt. Or, perhaps this disk is merely battered and bruised.

benji wrote:There is a free Windows XP disc image that Microsoft gave out for IE testing you can get if you don't have an XP disc or image but you have to set the dates back in the VM, I totally didn't find out how to do this because I just used an image of a disc I had but there are tutorials out there.

I've been messing around with this a bit, as I wanted to update our collection of screenshots for the old games in our new portals and in the Wiki. I was able to get NBA Live 98 to run without any issues, but as Ben noted before NBA Live 99 is a bit stubborn, generally locking up whenever you try to actually play a game while the menus work just fine.

It's been working fine for me since, at any rate, always getting through to actual gameplay without a single lock up. If you want to give it a try, make sure that you download those files from within VMWare, otherwise you won't be able to apply them to the games installed therein.

Once again, NBA Live 98 has been working for me fine so far but if the vanilla game is causing problems, it also received an update which can still be downloaded here:NBA Live 98 Bug Fix Patch

The Voodoo3 Fix does seem to fix Live 99 for whatever reason. Though it doesn't fix the fact that I didn't even realize who would be on my team when I said "sure, I'll take the Bulls as my team!" (And it crashes sometimes on exit...which isn't an actual big deal since I can just reboot or shut down the VM.)

Speaking of Live 99, the games "resolution" options are still kinda hilariously vague.

Live 97's DOS version works fine with DOSBox, do not have a Windows version (if there is one) to check.

Not Live related, but NBA Full Court Press works just fine through the VMWare method.

Also, you can drag and drop files to and from the VM window from your actual PC. Or even copy/paste URL's into whatever browser you have on there. (The latter can be wonky sometimes though.)

I love having to go through and check mark everything because yes, I can afford to install all 400 MB of this game's sound and movies.

Last edited by benji on Sun Sep 02, 2012 5:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

I remember how pissed my father would get when I would be deleting folders I had no idea about just to make up enough space on our hard-drive back then just to install Live 96 and do a "full installation".

Windows xp resolution is 1280x927 NBA live 99 display always small.NBA live 2004 game resolution 1280x1024x32 the screen is a small beginning followed by high. Resolution does not match.(image) game hangs.?